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Adherence to Core Financial Report Semantics Over 99.1% in all Categories

My last analysis set of SEC XBRL financial filings had 4416 form 10-K and 10-Q in it. I have tuned my core financial report semantics slightly and I have been able to get the minimum adherence to these core semantics up to 99.1% or higher in all categories.  Below I provide this information and the lists of all outliers.

So, of these 4416 SEC financial filings:

  • Registered Name: I am only really providing this as a control.  100% of all SEC XBRL financial filings report their registered name.  But, there is an important connection here.  The reason that 100% of filers report this is that it is required by the SEC Edgar Filer Manual (EFM) and SEC EFM validation upon submission tests for this.  The point? If something is required and tested during SEC filing submission, there will be 100% of the filers providing this fact.
  • Assets: All but 3 filers reported assets, this is 99.99% of all filings in my test set.  This is a list of those 3 filers which did not. All of these 3 filers had a balance sheet, but they only had liabilities and equity; no assets reported.  So, I can easily get this up to 100% by a slight adjustment to my algorithm.  Or, it seems to me that "balance sheet" means you have both sides of "assets" and "liabilities and equity". As such, seems it would be better to report assets with zero assets in order to have a true balance sheet.
  • Liabilities and equity: All but 39 filers reported liabilities and equity (99.3% did). This is a list of those 39 filers which did not. There could be two things wrong here.  Either the US GAAP Taxonomy is missing the concept "Liability and member equity" or a number of filers are using the wrong concept.  Same sort of deal with redeemable noncontrolling interest (like #36 on the list, go look where liabilities and equity should be on the balance sheet).  Resolving these two issues and a few minor tweaks to my search algorithm would get this to 100%.
  • Equity: All but 41 filers reported equity (99.1% did).  This is a list of those 41 filers which did not.  The same issue with member equity mentioned above is true here; either there is a missing concept from the US GAAP taxonomy or filers are using the wrong concept.  Easy to get this up to 100% also.
  • Net Income (Loss): All but 10 filers reported net income (loss) (99.8% did).  This is a list of those 10 filers which did not.  Of these, I see 4 rather obvious errors where filers created extension concepts for net income (loss).  There are 5 filers who used rather questionable concepts as I see the world.  One filer did not provide an income statement at all, appropriately based on the filing.  Easy to adjust this algorithm to get it to 100%.
  • Net Cash Flow: All but 10 filers reported net cash flow (99.8% did). This is a list of those 10 filers which did not.  Of these 10, there were 4 filers who created inappropriate extension concepts and 4 which did not report a cash flow statement and therefore you would not expect to see net cash flow.  Again, easy to get the search algorithm to 100%.

To get a list of the exact concepts I am looking for, see the Financial Report Semantics and Dynamics Theory, the "Proof" section has the concepts.

Posted on Sunday, April 1, 2012 at 08:16AM by Registered CommenterCharlie in | CommentsPost a Comment

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